[theora] Theora/Thusnelda features questions.

[Ralph Giles]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Christopher Blizzard wrote:

> To the untrained eye these seem like knobs that could be adjusted pretty
> easily, but maybe with changes to the format.  Would they need changes to
> the Theora format (i.e. a Theora 2) to bridge the gap to HD content?

Yes, those could be fixed with a format revision. However, if you're
going to go to the pain of upgrading everyone's decoder, why not use
dirac? Or fix a whole bunch of other infelicities, less obvious to the
untrained eye, and build a whole new codec? We've had this debate both
ways several times. :)

Anyway, it's not so much that theora can't do HD content, as that it's
tuned for 'web video' bitrates. At high bitrates (higher than consumer
bandwidth can stream) Dirac and h.264 will just do a better job
encoding a 'visually lossless' version than theora will, and this is
more obvious when you have more pixels.

 -r